by David Guymer
A few metres upslope, Burr harried the withdrawing Ruststalkers with bolter-fire. Even some of the adepts that had escorted Iron Father Ares took pot-shots. Their combined contribution was insignificant even against Burr alone, but would factor into the Sicarians’ calculus before they decided where to strike again. Lurrgol was conscious, but immobilised; eyes trapped inside a paralysed head tracked furiously towards every report of bolter-fire. He was recoverable, however, thanks to Kardaanus’ intervention.
Of Kardaanus, there was little left to be recycled.
Stronos gritted his teeth. The pain in his chest was one he did not want the interlink to take from him. But it did anyway. The hole it left behind was somehow bigger than what had occupied it, the knowledge of its loss making it ache all the more.
‘The Ancient’s strength has failed him,’ he muttered. ‘He is no longer iron.’ As he watched, anger rising faster than it could be exloaded, Ares shredded a walker with a prolonged burst of his assault cannon, then scattered an infiltrator clade with a spread of grenades. The skitarii’s superior analytics were already leading them to adapt their approach: the infiltrators scattered before the Dreadnought’s rampage, and, unheeded, an Ironstrider Ballistarii riddled his flank with autocannon-fire. Damaging hits.
‘Is he blind too, or merely broken?’ With a curse, Stronos opened a data-link to the receding Dreadnought.
No reply.
‘He can’t help himself.’ Yolanis came to him. The bloodied lascannon that hung from his power pack and that he held in his iron hand took her aback for a moment, her eyes widening. ‘He… he’s reliving some prior memory. Or possibly one of the million or so simulus inloads he’s experienced over the past days.’
‘That damns you, adept. It does not absolve him.’
‘I know that! Most damning of all, I don’t even know how exactly this is my fault.’
She was so small. Stronos could have broken her with a look. He glanced over the adept’s cohort, frightened figures all, garbed in red like insects intent on appearing poisonous.
‘Could another of your enginseers do better?’
Yolanis did not answer straight away. She looked up at him defiantly. ‘No.’
Stronos felt his anger ebb. His armour seemed to shrink about his frame, and suddenly he did not tower above the mortal female as he had. ‘What do you see out there?’ He gestured towards the hazing wind, the pockets of gunfire that splintered the dune.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Out there, adept. I will not say that you look upon the most implacable warrior collective ever forged – I am not the Omnissiah – but if such a force exists anywhere then it has yet to do battle in this galaxy. You look upon Iron Hands, and what began as an attempt to delay us an hour is going to become a massacre because Ares has taken from them what made them strong. For the protection of themselves and their claves my brothers have codewalled themselves. They act on independent imperatives now and will listen to no one until the field is cleared. But the skitarii have already adapted. See how they work to isolate individual claves or demi-claves, bringing them down one at a time before engaging another.’
‘Can the next in line not take over? What if the Iron Father had been disabled in battle?’
‘Then the claves would not have isolated themselves against his madness, and command protocols would have been instantaneously transferred.’
‘Could you take over?’
‘I would be last in the chain. I have held my rank a matter of days. And you continue to neglect the principle issue. The claves are codewalled.’
‘There must be some way to override.’
‘If that were so then the action would make an ineffective defence, would it not? The lockout can only be disabled from–’ Words failed him abruptly, as if power had been cut to his vocal cords. Somewhere deep in his subconscious, a mortal voice laughed at his stupidity. Had Ares himself not tried to warn him? So habituated had he become to the efficiency of interlinks and noosphere tethers, he had managed to neglect the obvious. He turned to Yolanis. ‘I may require the Iron Father’s command protocols.’
‘I think I can retrieve them.’
‘Be certain, adept. Can you retrieve them?’
‘I can get them.’ More firmly. ‘Anything else?’
Stronos tapped his helmet. ‘Just this.’
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> BLAST WASTES, THENNOS
>>> ORIGIN >>> JALENGHAAL, SERGEANT PERFUNCTIS
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
Jalenghaal pinned the Ruststalker under his boot while Morthol put two rounds between its optic dishes. He was otherwise engaged. The second melee construct thrashed at his head with blades and filament wires. He let it. He kept nothing there that he could not spare. When it was close enough he clubbed it down with the stock of his bolter. The weapon massed more than most men could lift, and with the strength of something more than mere transhuman behind it, it was always going to be a disabling blow. His voxware grizzled in his ear as he returned the acid-whitened gun stock to his armpit. Auto-identifiers assigned the incoming signal a name.
He surprised himself with a grunt. The name meant nothing to him. Emotion was a weakness, and Jalenghaal had no weakness.
‘Stronos,’ he answered, even as he resumed firing. Not that he was entirely surprised his sergeant had survived. He had calculated his death an even probability, after all. ‘Orders.’
>>>TERMINATING SIMULUS.
IV
In a contest between two evenly matched cogitators, the ability to be irrational became an advantage. Verrox had taught him that on Battakkan. No one had verbalised the thought, but everyone there accepted that the tau’s cogitators, for all their alienness, had been superior to theirs. It was equally clear to Stronos now that the skitarii’s were better too. That it made no sense did not invalidate the reality, and if the enemy could not be out-cogitated then it would simply need to be outfought. Verrox had crushed the tau on Battakkan utterly, combining a relentless ferocity with a preparedness to suffer casualties on a scale that the alien tau were not. Stronos would not have won that war had he been Iron Father, not with the resources that Verrox had been given, but he did not feel guilty about placing value on his brothers’ lives or those of the mortals under his command. It was irrational. It was unpredictable. And it was his advantage.
Of the twenty-one surviving sergeants, demi-clave commanders and tank-servitors only Jalenghaal accepted his authority and voluntarily disabled his codewalls without demanding confirmation of Ares’ codes. Of the remaining twenty, only Sergeant Artex refused to acknowledge those authorisations. To Stronos’ mind, that put the lie to the concept that the Iron Hands were incapable of error. Either it was Artex making one or everyone else, but someone had to be.
Stronos shook his head. When had he started to think like that?
If anything, it was Jalenghaal’s swift compliance rather than Artex’s intransigence that surprised him more.
Guided now by a single authoritative will, it became a straightforward act to manoeuvre the Predator tanks at vanguard and rearguard out of the confusion of vehicles and onto the rising dune. At Stronos’ order the two groups converged, adopting a wedge formation with an armoured Vindicator siege variant at point, the Whirlwind in the protected hole within, loosing hissing missile volleys into skitarii positions as the tanks ground upslope. Bike outriders drew in tight to the flanks to harry any Sydonian walkers that might attempt to encircle them and get at the tanks’ thinner side and rear armour, and the Iron Hands claves pushed in hard behind, scouring the dune with ordered fire patterns as they went.
Only Stronos, Burr, the adepts and the stalled Land Raider Anvilarum took no part in the advance. Even Artex and Ares moved with it, after a fashion. Their actions
were erratic, but Stronos quickly saw that distracting the skitarii with something that would not easily cogitate was only to his advantage. On a basic level, commanding a demi-clan was little different from commanding a clave, an expansion rather than a transformation, the increase in complexity arithmetic rather than logarithmic. Stronos found the step up a smaller one than he had expected.
A blast at the extreme range of his lascannon melted the cover of a skitarii sniper, enabling the sponson heavy bolter of the passing Predator, holding its fire for that precise moment, to mow down the infiltrator’s entire clade.
The rational action for a commander in Stronos’ situation to have taken would have been to consolidate his remaining assets and then repel. The skitarii would certainly have been taken aback by such an action after facing a previously disordered foe, but an irrational offensive action, coupled with the twin incalculables of Ares and Artex would take longer to cogitate. Longer than they had. Because, when all the complexities and calculi were balanced out and boiled down to their solution, whatever adaptations these skitarii had somehow accrued, the Iron Hands were superior in every sense.
As the Predator wedge drove the skitarii clear of his weapons’ range and bike outriders roared out to stymie their attempts at circling back, Stronos lowered his borrowed lascannon.
He considered the skitarii. Sensing connections that for the moment did not require the force of proof, his mind turned towards the Devilfish and the other alien vehicles he had seen in Port Amadeus. Verrox had said that Thennos had special license to dissect xenotech, something that Lydriik and his commander, Harsid, had confirmed. As Verrox had stated, and as the Father himself had warned in the Canticle, the potential for corruption was endless. Could the skitarii have somehow incorporated something akin to tau prognosticators into their hardware?
Or technology more alien and perverse even than that?
‘They are withdrawing,’ said Yolanis, at his side, taking relieved gasps on her rebreather. ‘Praise the Omnissiah.’
She was probably gladdened that her failures had not cost them as highly as they could have. But her superiors would be informed. Stronos would see to it that Nicco Palpus himself was told personally. ‘Praise him by fulfilling your function. Take your adepts and reassume control of the Anvilarum. Go after Ancient Ares and retrieve him… somehow.’
‘Yes, lord sergeant.’ She bowed, then started off through the thick rad-sand towards the Land Raider. After a few paces she turned back. ‘Aside from my adepts, no one knows about Ares’ breakdown. What should we tell them?’
As Stronos thought on it, the Ancient smashed in a crest of sand and bathed an empty wreck in flame from his underslung assault weapon, all the while delivering a howl of fury from his augmitter pipes. Stronos felt himself recoil from the bared emotion.
To lie outright to his own brothers felt alien to him, but the truth, that a machine as venerable as Tubriik Ares could falter, would be devastating. Though he loathed it no less, he began to understand the motives that must have driven the one who had ordered the doctoring of the Columnus simulus files.
‘I will make a decision when I have to.’
The eyes behind the woman’s mask expressed surprise. He was getting better at reading them. It was unlike one of the Iron Hands to prevaricate; before he was forced to repeat himself, however, she bowed again and hurried off into the blowing sands to carry out her orders, summoning her staff to her.
‘The skitarii flee over the interdiction line,’ observed Burr. Stronos’ battle-brother betrayed no emotion at being compelled to sit this particular fight out. Battle was a function; pride and glory were weaknesses that served it no advantage. ‘We can press them no further.’ Even as he spoke, pre-embedded command protocols from higher authorities than Ares were causing the battle tanks to break off their assault on the dune. Their rearguard taking pot-shots at the decelerating armour wedge, the skitarii disappeared over the other side of the crest.
With the expanded tactical overlay conferred to him by Ares’ protocols, Stronos could see the skitarii’s exit vector as plotted by the auto-strategos units, extrapolated by noospherically interlinked cogitators and plotted graphically to his visor display. It took a few seconds. They were making a direct line for Locis Primus, and if they did not alter course between here and there then they were going to hit the rear echelons of Fabricator-Locum Velt’s force in a few hours. He knew that he could not trust vox over that kind of range, not under the current conditions, and he had seen for himself just how fast these skitarii builds could move. Stronos was facing a journey at least five times that of the skitarii’s along their prescribed course.
‘There are no blast facilities between our present location and Locis Primus. Any secrets that the Adeptus Mechanicus do not want shared will not be imperilled by our crossing at this point.’
‘None that you know of,’ Burr corrected. ‘For a cult so dedicated to the accrual of information they display a singular recalcitrance in its dissemination.’ There was no censure in his tone. Merely an expression of proven fact.
‘It is time to be adaptable. Is that not the cornerstone of the Iron Creed?’ Burr offered up no response either way, and Stronos opened a clan-wide channel, not just to his immediate subordinates, but to every battle-brother in range.
‘Until Iron Father Ares is fully restored, I remain in command. All brothers to return to transports and maintain full battle readiness. We are crossing.’
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> LOCIS PRIMUS, THENNOS
>>> ORIGIN >>> TRAITORIS PERDITA >>ERROR>>
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
‘Hail the Omnissiah. With each aborted step are we brought closer to his perfect design.’
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
‘Data is the indestructible unifier. It is data that will reveal the implicit schematic, synchrony of metal and flesh, for all are equal in their potential before the Machine, and equally abhorrent to Him in our transitory imperfection.’
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
‘So portends the prophet-alpha, i. Hail the Omnissiah. The time of His revelation is at hand.’
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
>>> TERMINATING SIMULUS.
Chapter Twelve
‘A bolt-round to the back of the head will end a fight as surely as a power sword to the front. Outcome is all. Consideration of anything more is pride, and pride is weakness.’
– Veteran-Sergeant Maarvuk
I
Arven Rauth could not see the wing of Mechanicus fighters until they passed out of a band of starry black sky and across a swell of sickly yellow cloud. A wink of crimson became several, growing larger with distance-dilated slowness to become a formation of blunt, wedge aspect Avenger strike fighters. The air rumbled after them as the aircraft lashed overhead. Rauth watched them go, and seconds later saw explosions prickle the towering adamantine shard of Locis Primus.
The bulk of the capitolis facility was subterranean, the surface superstructure merely a nigh indestructible hardpoint for a blister of comms vanes, antennae and auspectoriae. Its thick walls were a super-solid adamantine-duracrete composite, cross-bonded to shock-reductive layers, and with a glassy external sheeting of some energy-dissipating meta-metal, the name of which had been redacted from Rauth’s inloads.
The Avenger wing banked and scattered, flak spitting after them as they jinked through the guy wires and pylons that forested the structure’s base. The explosions of their boltcannon and lascannon fizzed out to reveal a structure unmarred by so much as a scorch mark. Rauth shook his head as more earthshattering blows from Ordo Reductor artillery tanks pounded the Primus shard to similar effect. I’m glad the calculus logi are on our side. A direct lance strike from the Commandment would not have cracked those walls.
He turned as he felt Khrysaar tap him on the shoulder and took the offered magnoculars. Five Scouts and one pair of magnoculars. It sounds like a joke. Bringing them to his eyes, the lingua-technis chattering from his vox scanner dialled down to a cursive click indistinguishable from that of his rad-metre, he scanned the terrain.
It was a nightmare.
Vehicle wrecks ranging from sentinel scout walkers to alien superheavies of impenetrable design formed a shapeless outer wall, their crushed remains mortared and partially camouflaged with yellow sand. There were clearings. Bombed-out test silos in shallow craters. Long-disused trenches. Avenues of sorts where data ran from peripheral stations to the Primus through corroded metal pipes. The occasional rusty plume marked the position of Fabricator-Locum Velt’s legios as they advanced through minefields or discovered abandoned ordnance. Fireteams duelled with bunkers that, it turned out, were not so abandoned after all, while bulldog Triaros Armoured Conveyers snarled in tank traps as they strove to forge ahead. Siege tanks and Ordinatus superheavies sought to clear space with mixed success.
This was galactic war, rendered down to a planetary scale, and a small planet at that, a panorama of entropy and destruction on a scale that, if they allowed themselves to dwell on it at all, would have kept lord generals up at night.
To state it plainly, it was a mess. Rauth yearned to get his hands on it and impose order. To his surprise his flesh hand was sweating, the cold whoosh of his bionic heart accelerating to meet his body’s crude demands for blood.
‘The Mechanicus are in a hurry to kill one another,’ he muttered. ‘They hardly need us.’
‘Then maybe we should go home?’ Khrysaar twisted his body in order to squeeze it up to the angle made by the alien tank’s roof hatch and the ground. Further from the shard, the wrecks got younger, the obliteration between them more widely spaced. The upturned carcass of a heavy skimmer, its light-repellent alien design belonging to no race Rauth could identify, currently provided shelter to his clave. Its hull plate creaked to the futile endeavours of the Ordo Reductor.
